"OK, a word about Fiesta: What you're
hearing is the official party line. Don't believe the hype. Fiesta
is 10 days of San Antonio raza getting drunk, partying - all the
while oblivious to the fact that they're actually celebrating Davy
Crockett stealing Mexico from their ancestors.

Over 216 official events crowd the week-and-a-half calendar in
almost every section of the city. Sounds egalitarian, I know, but
highlights of Fiesta include these rich guys from an all-white,
men's-only, so-called social club crowning one of their own King
Antonio. All week long, King Antonio gets official police escorts,
as they drive from place to place, handing out cheap medals. And
sometime during the week, one of the rich white guy's daughters is
crowned queen in a dress that costs over $30,000.

Again, no raza
allowed. And did I mention all this in a city over 60 percent
brown?" — Amalia in Speeder Kills

"Spirited and proud, Mendiola's movie-a-clef is a celebration
of do-it-yourself ingenuity and community identity, and even makes
room for a parade hijacking modeled on Ferris Bueller's Day Off." --
2003
LA Film Festival

Que Viva Rock and Roll: Speeder Kills

Of the fascinating and rarely seen films
featured in the Latino CineMedia Festival, [this] offer surprising and refreshing insights into the enduring power of rock and roll, and film, as media of communication, self- and cultural expression, rebellion, and activism.

Speeder Kills deftly blends documentary and fiction filmmaking as it relates the symbolic hijacking of the Fiesta (a San Antonio tradition honoring the conquest of the Alamo by Anglo settlers) by a local Chicano punk-metal band and their videographer, a young Chicana video artist named Amalia Ortiz (played by the real-life Amalia Ortiz). Ortiz narrates a satiric yet ultimately fond tale of middle-class Latino culture, the politics of the art world and academia, San Antonio civic boosterism, folk art, and MTV; the film reserves a sharper critique for the idea of Chicanos celebrating the mythology of the Alamo. It is a witty and delicious meditation on art, culture, and identity.

Reality Redefined

CineFestival explored not stereotypes, but complexities and
nuances of Latino culture

Mendiola's new film, Speeder Kills, had just made its world
premiere at the 26th annual CineFestival, only hours after he had
finished editing it. The movie is a fictionalized documentary within
a documentary, in which a local Chicano punk band called Speeder
disrupts the annual Fiesta
celebration by dressing as parade queens, hijacking a float and
bashing out the Runaways' "Cherry Bomb" to confused parade watchers.

In the world of Speeder Kills, Fiesta is a bad joke, every bit as
absurd as Miss Togar's disciplinary policies in Rock & Roll High
School: a media hypefest in which moneyed Anglos convince Latinos to
celebrate the fact that 19th-century, coonskin-capped frontiersmen
took Texas away from Mexico. You could sense the conspiratorial
exhilaration in the packed theater every time Speeder mercilessly
mocked another Fiesta tradition.

So it wasn't a shock that the one post-screening comment from a
Speeder audience member wasn't really a question, but a declaration.
"Thank you," the viewer emphatically said, "for telling the truth
about Fiesta."

The Speeder screening brought into focus one of the best things
about CineFestival: the way it offers stories from the inside, for
an audience that understands the references. While it shouldn't
necessarily be such a remarkable thing to see Latinos depicted as
complex and contadictory, it's still a novelty in 2003...

"CineFestival is important for Latino filmmakers because you get
it," [Jesse] Borrego said. "The Raza in San Antonio always gets it. You're
the sounding board for what we want to represent to the rest of the
world"...